Tracking billboards could give you the eyeball

A camera that monitors eye movements from up to 10 metres away makes it possible for smart billboards that track the attention of passers-by.

The developers behind the technology - dubbed Eyebox2 - believe it could have a range of possible applications, but should particularly interest advertisers. This is because it allows billboards to track people's attention and perhaps respond when it wanes.

Until now, eye-tracking systems have only worked over about half a metre.

"It's less accurate than those systems, but it is good enough to let us know whether you are looking at a display or billboard or not," says lead developer Roel Vertegaal from Queen's University in Ontario, Canada.

The system uses an array of infrared LEDs and a 1.3 megapixel digital camera to monitor eye movements. The camera has higher resolution than most eye-tracking systems, and can easily pick out the distinctive infrared signature from a pair of human pupils from up to 10 metres. It can also track several people at once and can determine their gaze from four metres away to within 15 degrees.

Distance benefits

Most eye tracking devices monitor people while they use a computer. This can reveal, for example, which parts of a picture or a web page they are focusing on (see The mind ogles: Women are worse).

Being able to track gazes over greater distances opens up several new possibilities, according to Vertegaal. Space on advertising screens in public places could be sold "by the eyeball", he suggests. Or, the products in a store that get the most glances could be recorded.

"We are launching with the advertising market in mind, but there are many other applications," Vertegaal told New Scientist. The team has also tested it as a means of controlling a home entertainment system. "When you stop looking at the screen for a time, the image pauses until you are looking back again," Vertegaal says.

Focusing attention

And, another project involves making hearing aids function more effectively through eye tracking. "When you are looking at someone you automatically filter out other noise to hear what they are saying," Vertegaal says. "[Similarly] an eye tracker could tell a hearing aid what to focus on."

Vertegaal and colleagues have created a company, called Xuuk, to develop and market Eyebox2 commercially.

Linden Ball, a psychologist at Lancaster University in the UK, uses eye tracking to study human-computer interaction. He says such a system could perhaps provide a more natural way to control things on a large display. "If the accuracy is great enough, this technology might make eye tracking one way of doing that," he says.

Ball adds that advertisers already use eye-tracking technology to monitor the way people respond to adverts presented on a computer screen. "They could get similar data in a more natural environment," he says. "For example, which posters people attend to, how long they look for, whether they take in the whole thing, and the effect of logos or dynamic information like animations."

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Eyebox2 can track the gaze of several people at once from 10 metres away (Image:Xuuk)